According to klout.com/BillCammack, I’m a “Broadcaster”.. To them, that means “You broadcast great content that spreads like wildfire. You are an essential information source in your industry. You have a large and diverse audience that values your content.”

I mention that because I’m glad they changed my category from “Pundit”. Pundits get on my last nerve. :D

I didn’t have anything against pundits before a few months ago when I started following the Republican debates to see whether they were going to field a viable team to potentially defeat President Obama in 2012.

The problem I have with them now isn’t really their fault, but they have to deal with a new development in television broadcasting which I call “Internet Blog-Influenced News Cycles”.

When Hillary Is President

Back in the day… The day was exactly February 09, 2007, in fact, which I know because I posted this link => http://billcammack.com/2007/02/09/reelsolidtv-episode-39-when-hillary-is-president/, I recognized that this was going to be an issue for television stations.

At that time, my long-time friend and business associate Joseph Ruiz and I were videotaping events for politicians.

Also, at that time, I had never even heard of Barack Obama, which is why the post and the video are entitled “WHEN Hillary is President”! :D

Blip.TV Link => blip.tv/file/146156

I was filming with my MiniDV camera, but I saw several camerapeople with large cameras with stickers for television stations on the side.

I remember thinking to myself, I’m going to have this video live way before they are, because *MY* network is already in place, and waiting for media from me to go live.

The stations the camerapeople were shooting for only had news at 12 lunchtime and 6pm, and Hillary spoke around 10:30am. This meant that by the time I encoded my video, tagged and uploaded it, it would be going live around 2pm, whereas the camerapeople wouldn’t even be back to their offices before 12pm with the tapes, AND THEN they were going to have to give the tapes to producers, who were going to have to watch the whole thing for content and then write copy about it and decide which sound bites to use, AND THEN the producers were going to have to hand the tapes off to editors to make into the final product (which I know because that’s what I did for Bloomberg Television and Court TV for years), AND THEN it was going to be another hour before that video would be ready for air, AND THEN they were only going to play a few seconds’ worth of the video because they had so many other things to talk about during their 30 minutes (22 minutes, actually, when you subtract the time for commercials) of television news between 6pm and 6:30, and that’s exactly what happened.

My video went live around 2pm that day. I was watching the news at 12 on the stations that had sent cameras… nothing… When they finally announced the event at 6pm, they used probably about 7 seconds worth of footage, or the amount of time that Ronnie and Mike got to fight on Jersey Shore before the 300-pound bouncers that are always standing barely off-camera jumped in, and then they moved on.

Meanwhile, I showed the entire speech from beginning to end because I had had my camera rolling the entire time, and I have *ZERO* time constraints because I am my own internet network.

2011 – Rise Of The Pundits

Fast-Forward to 2011, and the television news has been fully affected by social media powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter.

They know that if they don’t report things immediately, they’re going to be LATE in the news cycle.

This calls for an entirely different approach from when people used to have to wait for 12pm, 6pm, and 11pm to roll around so we could find out what was going on in the world.

If something important happens at 1pm, 6pm is too late to report it as if it’s news.

This is also why a bunch of newspapers fell off, BTW. The time it takes to figure out the story, get it approved by executive producers, put it in print form, print the copies, and move the physical papers to the locations where people can buy them means that you’re AUTOMATICALLY going to be out-of-date way before your newspaper hits the stands.

The papers that didn’t migrate to an internet-based delivery format lost out.. BIG TIME!

This is why we’ve now experienced the rise of the pundits.

According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pundit_(expert):

A pundit is someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are knowledgeable. The term has been increasingly applied to popular media personalities.[1] In certain cases, it may be used in a derogatory manner as well, as the political equivalent of “ideologue.”

Pundits are necessary because they’re expected to speak *BEFORE* facts are revealed instead of *AFTER* facts are revealed. o_O

This is simultaneously what makes them so annoying to me.

I agree with the first part of the definition: “Someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary”, but I disagree with the second part: “on which they are knowledgeable”.

Because you know something about politics doesn’t mean you know *ANYTHING* about a particular political situation.

For instance.. I know about music mixing. If you show me a video and then say “The mixer used Waves’ Renaissance Compressor instead of Waves’ PuigChild compressor.. Why did s/he do that? o_O” I’m going to tell you that you get two different sounds by using the two different compressors on a track, AND that RComp is transparent (to my hearing), while PuigChild colors the sound (makes it sound different than it originally did).

However.. If you were to play a song for me and then ask me the dumb-ass question “Do you think the mixer used RComp or PuigChild on this track? o_O”, I have no choice but to tell you a bunch of garbage, because I. DON’T. KNOW!

Either the track sounded the same before the compressor went on, in which case, I’d guess RComp, *OR* it sounded different before the compressor went on, in which case, I’d guess PuigChild, and that *ASSUMES* that the person asking me had some sort of advance knowledge that it HAD to be one of the two that was used.

What Do You THINK?

This is why pundits are so annoying.

The news cycle is now immediate. I find out things from Twitter and Facebook way faster than I do from television, even if I leave a news channel running live all day.

This is because if a bridge falls down or a plane lands in some water, Citizen Journalists don’t have to wait to decide whether they care about an event or not, and they don’t have to wait for EPs (Executive Producers) to approve their media. They just send it.

Granted, and to the credit of Mass Media, there’s way more fact-checking that goes on before they output their content all late and after-the-fact.

The new immediacy of the news cycle, which has been created by internet connectivity and Citizen Journalism, has made pundits necessary to fill the space between when a television station finds out about something and when they can actually report something substantial about it.

Meanwhile, it’s all garbage.

As soon as the Herman Cain, feel-a-chick-up-in-a-car allegations were dropped, all of a sudden, we were subjected to infinite opinions about Sexual Harassment and whether he did it or not.

Not only did we have to hear this ONCE, but CONSISTENTLY and PERSISTENTLY, until he finally had a press conference to deny the allegations.

Meanwhile, none of these people know jack-**** about jack-**** because they weren’t there (if she has ever been in a car with Cain at all), and they don’t know what happened, so they need to STFU.

BLAH BLAH BLAH Should he bow out of the race? o_O

BLAH BLAH BLAH Are women going to come out of the woodwork, accusing him of harassment? o_O

BLAH BLAH BLAH Is he going to lose a lot of support in the next poll? o_O

Meanwhile.. When the actual fact rolls around, he’s still at the top of the charts with Romney, and when he says the allegations are unfounded, he practically receives a standing ovation at the Republican Debate, so all this punditry was just a big waste of time, wasn’t it?

C’Mon, Sunn :/

To make matters worse, the television stations feel the need to discuss these things consistently, throughout their broadcast day, in order to appear “on top of the news”.

I wish there were a “How do you know that?” or “What facts are you basing your opinion on?” button that we could press and get these people to STFU when they’re just running their mouths about things they don’t know anything about.

In fact, their opinions don’t matter, and except for actual experts in certain things like health matters and monetary policy, there’s only a slight percentage chance that anything they say will turn out to be accurate at all.

The only reason the experts are accurate is because they’re giving their opinions based on a series of actual situations that panned out a certain way in the past.

What can you say for sure in the Cain situation?.. Nothing.

Their statements are diametrically opposed. Either he’s lying or she’s lying. There’s no statistical evidence supporting either guess. Sometimes guys are telling the truth in Sexual Harassment situations, and sometimes gals are. Sometimes, they both are, but they interpreted the situation differently or remember it differently, especially if alcohol is involved.

All you can do, honestly, is report the facts (or lack thereof) and then move on.

Since this isn’t acceptable entertainment, a whole bunch of know-nothings are booked to talk yang on television, for essentially ZERO educational value.

To make matters worse.. Depending on which station you tune in to, you get a totally different spin on the exact same content.

One channel says “Please don’t frack our water, so we can light it on fire and get sick from drinking it”, and then the next channel says “**** your health! :D .. We don’t want government telling us we can’t pollute your water”.

One channel says “The only way to stimulate the economy is to put more money in the hands of ‘Job Creators’ by not raising taxes against them and simplifying the tax code so they have confidence that the game’s not going to change on them next year after they hire a bunch of people” and the next channel says “We need to go into more debt and tax people more so we can put Americans to work right now”.

Meanwhile, nothing actually gets done, and people continue to starve and lose their homes, with no end in sight.

What I’m wondering is that if these pundits are supposed to be so knowledgeable about their specific areas of concentration, how come they’re not arriving at the exact same conclusions and providing viable and irrefutable solutions to this current American crisis? o_O
–
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Pretty much every single week, I have to hear about people that fell for the okey-doke because someone SAID one thing and then DID another thing.

Please get a clue.. Stop listening to what people say. Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words. Try to focus on reality instead of some fantasy someone pumped into your brain.

Boob Jobs

So I’m watching this week’s ‘Jerseylicious’ episode, and they’re talking about how Olivia wants a “Boob Job”.

Basically, she’s not happy with her usual process of wearing several bras at a time plus padding them with “chicken cutlets” so she can look like she has big tits when she doesn’t. She’s set up an appointment to go get actual breast implants from a doctor. I believe she had decided she wanted a D-cup.

Fortunately for her, she ran into a chick that happened to be waiting in the doctor’s office to get a breast REDUCTION, which totally freaked Olivia out and she elected not to get her boob job that she had been raving about for ages.

The most important part of this storyline was a story she told about her mother. She said that she really liked the proportions of her mother’s body and had asked her when her tits were going to grow to look like her mother’s. The response she received was that her mother experienced a growth spurt around 21/22 years old.

After years of believing this, Olivia eventually found out that her mother had gotten a boob job.. Which means that genetically, there was no reason why Olivia should expect to naturally get any larger than she already is, which led to this implant obsession.

This is what happens when you fall for the okey-doke. This is what happens when you base your perception of reality on a lie. “I’m supposed to get this because someone told me I was going to get it”. “My life is supposed to unfold this way because someone told me it was supposed to”…

This is useful when we are kids because we can all utilize fantasies to help us understand adult concepts. Santa Claus brings the toys. The Stork brings the babies. The Tooth Fairy puts money under your pillow…

If these things cross over into your adult life, you’re going to have a problem adjusting to reality. Kids that don’t understand that babies come from a guy screwing a chick, not because some bird flew out of the sky and randomly deposited a baby where your family could find it end up surprised when they’re having sex for recreation and the girl gets pregnant. \o/ Whose fault is THAT? Is it the fault of the kid for not Googling “Child Birth”, or is it the parents’ fault for shirking responsibility and relying on fables instead of telling their son or daughter the truth about reality?

How tough would it have been for Olivia’s mother to SAY that she got a boob job instead of setting her daughter up to believe that her tits were ever going to grow? o_O

How tough is it for mothers to explain to their kids that their father is a ******* selfish-ass DEADBEAT who abandoned the family because he’s a JERK and not because the kids weren’t worth loving?

How tough is it for a guy to say “I have no intentions on dating you exclusively. I just feel like hooking up with you” and letting the gal decide whether she wants to roll with that program or not?

Unfortunately, there are times in life when people are going to lie to you. Your job is to check and test the logic and validity of what they’re saying to the best of your ability so you remain grounded in reality and don’t end up traveling down a path of your own creation.

Lies

I had a situation occur when I was a teenager that illustrated this point for me perfectly.

Due to my own fault (of miscalculation/misunderstanding, not intentional disrespect), I was scheduled to have a fight with this kid who was currently a friend of mine.

I didn’t want to have this fight, not because I would have lost (which I would have), but because I didn’t have any beef with him and liked him as a person. If I had disliked him at the time, we could have easily thrown the hands and I might have punched him in the face a few times in the process of getting my ass kicked. :D

So anyway.. I didn’t want to fight him, so this turned into a big argument with a big crowd watching. Some guy I’ve never seen before in my life starts instigating, telling me “Hit him.. You can take him.. Hit him!”.

Fortunately, a) this dude was a ******* NOBODY to me, so his opinion didn’t count, and b) I had already decided that I wasn’t going to fight my friend. This argument went on for quite a while, maybe 15 minutes, which is a LONG-ASS-TIME when a fight could break out at any second, and then we decided that there wasn’t going to be a fight and that was that.

Relatively soon after that.. I don’t remember whether it was a couple of days later or a couple of weeks later, I was hanging out and I heard someone talking. It turned out that it was the kid that had tried to instigate. He was talking to some other kid I didn’t know, saying “See that kid over there?.. The other day, he almost got his ass *BEAT* by this other kid, blah blah blah”.

That was a good learning experience for me because I got to reflect on what might have happened if I would have been so STUPID as to take some nobody’s advice on what I should do, especially when it pertained to an actual friend of mine.

I learned that people can SOUND incredibly sincere when they’re trying to get you to do something, but that doesn’t actually mean JACK ****. As much as they sound like they’re in your corner or have your best interests at heart… When the situation passes or when they decide they’ve gotten their entire usefulness from you, you may or may not see their true colors after that. What you need to do is stick to YOUR convictions and take what other people say into account but don’t allow your decision-making process to be affected by people that haven’t proven that their word should mean something to you.

This is why I’m so tired of hearing about what people SAID, as if it actually means something. It doesn’t.

• He said we were in an exclusive relationship.
• She said it was my baby.
• He said he was going to take me shopping after we had sex.
• She said she was out with her girlfriends all night.
• He said he wants to take care of my kids as if they were his own.
• She said he was her cousin / co-worker / probation officer…
• He said he was going to pull out.

Just stop it, people… They said whatever they needed to say to get you to do whatever they wanted you to do. You fell for it and you got GOT. Learn the lessons you can take away from your experiences and make better assessments in the future.. HOPEFULLY focusing on what people *DO* and not what they SAY.
–
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The Emperor wears no clothes.

Here’s how fads occur..

Someone does something that other people agree is a good or stylish thing to do and then everyone copies that person.

Eventually, all the guys want to buy the same car and all the gals want to buy the same boots and sunglasses and nobody realizes they’re all following one person’s idea.

One of the social media fads has been to incorrectly categorize the credit people deserve for how large their social network is.

People who are merely information-passers are being said to have influence.

This has been going on for years already. Companies have actually posted job descriptions that require the applicants to have more than so many Twitter followers. I’d like to laugh at that except that it’s so pathetic. I already explained why the number of followers someone has doesn’t mean anything at all, but let’s go over that again.

Follow Me Back

When I first got involved with Twitter, a couple of years before the Civilians found out about it and talked about it on the evening news like as if they understood what they were supposed to do with it, the philosophy of the community was “follow back”. Anybody that followed you, you were ‘supposed’ to offer them the courtesy of following them back. This was fine with me at the beginning, because the only people that knew of me on Twitter were my friends from other social media sites, so anyone that added me, I actually WANTED to listen to.

This got out of hand when randoms started following me. I became accustomed to 10 new people that I had never heard of before following me on Twitter every single day. This made me question the concept of automatically following people back because it was no longer people I wanted to hear from. My Twitter stream was being diluted with minutia & drivel instead of being a rapid-access version of forums or newsgroups I had been a member of.

I stopped auto-following people. Meanwhile, I noticed that others continued to auto-follow, going so far as to figure out programs to automatically add anyone that followed them so they didn’t have to sit there all day, clicking “follow” on their accounts. Next thing you know, there are people with tens of thousands of Twitter followers that they don’t know and that don’t have any relevant information for them and that they have zero demographics for in order to explain to someone why the community they have access to is valuable to their company.

Amassing Followers

There are some people that are celebrities and microcelebrities and weblebrities (etc, etc) that actually had a lot of people following them legitimately. These people were popular in the space or pioneers or selected a niche and always kicked out pertinent information that people wanted to listen to. This was way before the SUL (Twitter Suggested User List), and these people were amassing a crowd of listeners who were passionate about what they had to say.

Other people, I noticed, hehehehe were making rapid advances towards surpassing my number of followers without having anything relevant to contribute whatsoever. These people are social media clowns.. bums.. There was no way they should have been advancing like that, so I started studying their progress to figure out what was going on.

SInce Twitter only updates their following/follower counts once a day, it took me 3 or 4 days to figure out what was happening. The people who were progressing way beyond their personal merit always had their followING count leading their followER count. In fact, the gap was becoming wider every day.

How To ‘Game’ Twitter

If you think about this, it makes sense. If you have 10 followers and I have 2,888 (my current count as of this writing), I seem prestigious to you. If I follow you, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to follow me back, first of all out of reverence for my accomplishments on Twitter (amassing followers) and secondly, so that you can say you’re connected to someone that a lot of people follow.

So.. I can essentially add ANYONE with fewer followers than I have and there’s a good chance they’re going to follow me back. On top of that, once they developed apps that told people who was following them back and who wasn’t, people were afraid of being unfollowed, so they got with the program.

These same apps added bulk following and unfollowing and then it was off to the races. The system-gamers would add HUNDREDS of people every day by going to the general population timeline and clicking “Follow” for anyone that posted anything. A percentage of those hundreds they added (which explains why their followING count is always higher than their followER count) add them back. The ones that don’t add them back get bulk deleted using the peripheral application. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

This is how people got so many Twitter followers before the SUL. In fact, gaming Twitter was so prevalent that people were getting people to pay them to explain how to amass followers. There were “clubs” where your price of admission for joining the club was that you had to follow everyone involved and your win was that everyone involved would follow you back.

Useless Community

Hopefully, you see what the problem is with gaining “followers” this way. You’re building a community of nobodies that don’t know anything in particular and have no particular demographic. People are following you IN ORDER TO GET FOLLOWERS FOR THEMSELVES and couldn’t possibly give a flying **** about what you say, ask or recommend.

This is why numbers of followers can’t possibly translate to “influence”. In order to have influence, you have to be determined to be an authority on the topic. The people that built their follower lists from people that recognized them as thought leaders, pioneers in the space or innovators have an active, useful, passionate group of listeners. THAT’S useful. What’s NOT useful is people who have tens of thousands of followers from gaming the system and providing no consistently demonstrable value to their “community”.

Unfortunately, when you incorrectly assign credit to numbers of followers, both camps look exactly the same. The person with 60,000 followers seems more influential than the person with 2,888 followers strictly by virtue of quantity over quality.

This is why companies go out like suckers and hire people based on their apparent fan base instead of whether they can do a job in a professional, efficient and cost-effective manor.

Anyway… Twitter finally figured this out and then set a cap on how much your followING number could exceed your followER number. This worked decently, but the damage was already done. People that shouldn’t have had so many followers already did. Also, they didn’t stop gaming the system by following people for no other reason than trying to get those people to follow them back, they just slowed their roll to the limits that Twitter set.

The next travesty was the Twitter Suggested User List.

Suggested User List

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

Basically, since people were joining Twitter and then having nobody to follow and nobody following them, Twitter offered people suggestions of whom they might follow… including someone’s ******* CAT! :/ (and *NOT* including then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama).

The problem with this was that at the end of the Twitter account creation process, they offered you two links.

One was a gigantic green arrow, which indicated that you could activate your account and automatically follow everyone on the SUL.

The other was a TEXT LINK that was practically unnoticeable that allowed you to activate your account WITHOUT adding the people on the SUL.

Of course, tons of people clicked on the green arrow, resulting in everybody on the SUL gaining tens of thousands of followers every single day who had never heard of them before, didn’t give a flying **** about them and probably hadn’t even heard of them before they accidentally followed them as a consequence of creating a Twitter account.

There was a hue and cry about this (as there very well SHOULD have been) from the people that had struggled to promote themselves and create their follower lists through legitimate marketing tactics and online presence management. The numbers that it took them years to build were surpassed in mere days by people who shot up from 20,000 followers to 200,000 followers in a matter of weeks, absolutely dwarfing the stats of the legit group and making them seem less popular… less… ?influential? O_o

The Town Crier

This is why it’s pathetically laughable when people attempt to equate number of followers with influence. Do you have a large network of people to whom you can quickly disseminate information? Yes. So does the Town Crier.

The Town Crier is in charge of telling people what influential people told him to say. The Town Crier didn’t make a single policy and probably wasn’t even invited to the meeting where the policies were made. He IS, however, the person that informs the masses about these policies.

Does that make the Town Crier influential? Nope. The Town Crier is a source of information.. A newscaster. An anchorperson for the nightly news. Does the anchorperson write the articles? Nope. Does the anchorperson decide what stories go on the air? Nope. Does the anchorperson film anything or interview anyone in the street? Nope. They’re not influential AT ALL, even though they’re the ones that INFORM YOU about news stories by reading from the teleprompter.

It’s exactly the same for people that have built social networks without demonstrating to anyone that they’re an authority on ANYTHING AT ALL. Are you influential because you have the ability to inform 60,000 Twitter accounts of an opportunity? Some people say “yes”. I say “no”. You’re a good person to *USE* to get the word out about something, but your numbers don’t indicate that you’re affecting anyone’s thought processes. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can get anyone to do anything they wouldn’t have done anyway without hearing your opinion. Your numbers don’t indicate how you attained them or why your followers followed you. Your numbers don’t indicate who’s actually listening to you. Your numbers don’t indicate who gives a **** what you think. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can build and maintain a community for a client and offer them an impressive ROI if they hire you to handle their social media presence.

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I can’t tell you anything about the actual Fast Company Influence Project because I never clicked on it. I never came close to clicking on it, which is where I feel we will discover some of the myriad lessons to be learned from this situation.

First Impression

The first time I heard of the project, I didn’t hear of the project.

What I mean by that is that I didn’t realize that I had had a run-in with the project before I realized that a) there was a project and b) people didn’t like it.

I’m sitting here minding my business, having a productive day, as usual.. When I get an IM from someone that I rarely have IM conversations with…

When you haven’t communicated with someone in quite a while, you want to lead off your message with that person’s NAME or at least a simple “Hi” or “How are you?” to see if you get a response BEFORE getting to your agenda. This is not what happened. I received:

Hey. Did you join the Fast Company thing? Here’s a link to sign up [shortened link to who the **** knows what]

So first of all, my name wasn’t on it. Second, they threw their agenda at me directly. Third, they didn’t describe the situation as anything other than a “thing” (which is why I had no idea that this had been a connected event until later). Fourth, they sent me a SHORTENED LINK, which nobody in their right mind follows.

This entire thing reeked of SPAM and I wasn’t sure that this person’s account hadn’t been compromised. I sent back “Thanks, I’ll check it out… How is _______?”, referencing a new initiative I knew that person had recently started.

No reply.

Nothing.

So now, this thing looks COMPLETELY like spam, so I completely disregarded it and went on with my day.

Second Impression

Hours later, this buzz is going around about some Fast Company contest. It’s not a GOOD buzz, though. It’s people shaking their heads like “Why did they do THIS? Who thought THIS was a good idea? \o/”.

So I still wasn’t aware of this contest even though I receive the FC Newsletter every day. I don’t actually read their newsletter. It’s just something I haven’t bothered to unsubscribe from that I was AUTO-SUBSCRIBED TO back in 2007/2008 when I was a FC Expert Blogger:

The point being that in my particular case, a newsletter is being sent to me which has no influence over me, which probably contained references & links to this so-called “Influence Project”, which I’ll never know because I don’t care enough to skim back through the emails and check.

Public Impression

The other way I get my news is through Facebook. The reason why I have 2,237 Facebook Friends and 122 Facebook Fans is that I want to LISTEN to the people I’m connected to via social media, not TALK *AT* THEM.

I want to know what they think is cool & interesting & happening so that I can find out about it myself, but also so I can broadcast the info I find useful to the people that are following me. On a fan page, the only info you get from people pertains to YOU, which is a waste for someone like me who isn’t an entertainer. I already know about ME. I want to know about YOU.

* Side Note: Facebook automatically reduces your home page’s “Most Recent” stream to something like 250 people. Unless you want them selecting the 250 people that you’ll be listening to, go to the bottom of your “Most Recent” page, click “Edit Options” on the right side of the blue bar and increase the number in the box that says “Number of Friends” to a number that’s larger than your current number of friends. Click “S ave” and you’ll now see whatever your friends are posting, not some pot luck selection.

So anyway.. I hadn’t heard anything about this contest on Facebook, I wasn’t monitoring Twitter, because I only have so much time in my day and something’s got to give. I don’t read the [daily] newsletter and the only indication I received about this was half-assed and didn’t even have the term “Influence Project” in it… So, to me, the project didn’t even exist.

I’m not saying this because I feel like FC gives a damn about influencing Bill Cammack. I’m saying this because the people that I’m listening to ARE the influencers. I don’t need to be directly influenced because if 3 or 4 people whose judgement I respect as far as social media indicate that something good’s going on, I’m hopping on the bandwagon, sight unseen. I’m not going to PUB IT to anyone I know until I get inside and play around with the site or app and determine to my own standards of quality that it’s worth telling other people about, but as far as being an early adopter, I know some of the EARLIEST ADOPTERS around, so I’m perfectly willing to follow their lead in situations that they’ve already researched.

Unfortunately for Fast Company, this works in the opposite direction as well…

Negative Impression

When the same people whose opinions I respect begin posting, reposting & RT’ing why something was a BAD IDEA or at least misses the mark, I’m inclined to read their posts about the situation and STILL never visit the actual site/location/app they’re talking about.

In fact, the only reason I’m writing this right now is that friends of mine are STILL buzzing about what a bad idea this was, so I decided to throw my two cents in. >:D

This is the reason you don’t want “just anybody” making up your social media strategy. Vision, Perception & Ability are all relative. If your concept of influence is flawed or skewed, you’ll never know that because it’s your idea and it’s what your version of reality’s based upon. If you think that the number of random people that you can trick into signing up for something indicates INFLUENCE, you’re barking up the wrong tree and you’re tarnishing the reputation of any company that takes your advice.

Pyramid Schemes work by each person telling the person below them that they can get rich if they can convince people to follow them. The more people you have under you, the more money you can make. What they don’t tell you is that the money is made by duping more suckers into joining the scheme. :D The product isn’t whatever you’re selling… The product is *YOU*. You’re like the cow that got told to come to the farm to give milk and then you’re like “Huh?.. What the hell is HAMBURGER??? O_o”.

Wrong Impression

Similarly, INFLUENCE has nothing to do with NUMBERS. I know of people that have tens of thousands of Twitter followers and everyone that I respect recognizes them as clowns. Their “Calls To Action” produce nothing at all (for example, 30 viewers to a live stream when you Twitter it to your 20,000 followers once every 20 minutes for two hours). They have ZERO unique opinions, regurgitating what they read in Mashable or TechCrunch or TechMeme. The majority of the people they’re following are robots, defunct accounts and real accounts of people that have nothing relevant to contribute at all. This is why between their own brains and the people they’re listening to, nothing unique or groundbreaking is ever produced.

I’ve been complaining about this literally for years, as talentless people are consistently selected for projects because the companies are banking on the fact that this person has 100,000 followers across several social media outlets, so every single one of their GARBAGE videos will appear to be well-received and popular because of the fanbois clicking on any tinyurl these so-called influencers feed them.

What happens next is that companies consistently get what they deserve. NOTHING! :D They hire scrubs that make GARBAGE content and then they get lots of page views from people that aren’t the target audience of the advertisers, which results in ZERO click-throughs, ZERO video views, ZERO subscriptions and generally ZERO ROI for the company that thought that the number of people following someone on Twitter indicates that their content or ideas are worth something.

The funny thing about this is that MOST of the actual influence occurs on the back-channel, where people say what they really feel about what’s going on. It’s not found out here in the open where people can read our ideas today and Google our ideas 3 years from now. The people that you think AREN’T influencers are having their discussions IRL, f2f and you never hear about it while your company goes down the tubes because you’re taking advice from the wrong people.

Lack of Impression

Ultimately, everything we’re doing is attempting to catalyze Conversion.

It’s all well & good that you can attract attention to yourself.

It’s lovely that you were able to amass 30,000 Twitter followers by clicking “follow” on every single post you saw in the live feed and hoping that they followed you back.

It’s great that you take pictures at conferences with other people.

It’s sweet that you know a lot of people whose names you can drop in Twitter posts.

It’s pathetic when you pull out the gun and squeeze the trigger and everyone realizes you have no bullets.

If you can’t convert, you’re useless. Period. If what you’re offering isn’t going to result in a company being better off than when they hired you, they should have saved their money or hired someone with a proven track record in that field.

Conversion isn’t achieved by getting people that don’t own lawns to visit a page where they’re selling lawn mowers. O_o The number of “nobodies” that you can get to sign up for something indicates your POPULARITY on the net as opposed to any potentially useful business value.

In order to be an “influencer”, you have to be able to run with the Big Dogs and potentially influence OTHER INFLUENCERS. Your ideas have to ultimately land in the laps of people who represent conversion to your clients. Getting a bunch of people to sign up for something proves nothing at all…. well.. other than proving that you don’t know what influence actually is.

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I was talking with my friend Remo last night and he asked me about Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for over two years at this point. I posted about it back in June 2007 [link].

At some point, he asked me about its usefulness. As I travelled back mentally to when I first joined, I reconnected with the essence of Twitter’s usefulness to me.

At the time I became aware of Twitter, we were all hanging out on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. South by SouthWest 2007 was in effect, and I got to follow along in essentially real-time as my friends couldn’t get cabs from one party to the next. From my command centre, I could keep up with things going on hundreds of miles away. Actually, I probably knew more than the people ‘on the ground’ did.

The value of Twitter for me was an acceleration of the interaction that was going on in the Videoblogging Group. Instead of sending a post, which was essentially an email, to a bunch of people and then waiting for them to be notified of it, read it, think about it, respond to it and then having to check back to see if I got an answer.. Suddenly, I could get responses to my queries immediately, if not sooner. Everybody that I was following was from our group, so everything I read was relevant and interesting to me, either on an educational or social level.

Flip Da Script

As we discussed the “right & proper” ways to utilize twitter, two camps evolved: “Follow people you want to hear from” and “Follow everyone that follows you [minus spammers]“. I basically joined the second camp. This had two important effects. My timeline had too many entries for me to follow because there were too many updates in each refresh, and the Twitter posts I was looking at were decreasingly relevant to anything at all. This meant that I had to search through MORE posts to find LESS relevant material, because there were only 10 pages of Twitter “archives” you could look through at the time.

So I made a second account, specifically to follow local NYC people. That was all well and good until everyone I was following stopped using twitter to announce where they were going. This was because there were no Twitter groups, so everything you said was available to whomever was following you, whether you wanted them to show up where you were hanging out or not.

Spammers

Meanwhile, people started spamming Twitter with “follows”. Some users would follow everyone in creation, hoping for a “follow back”. This was obvious, because the number of people they were following would be twice the number of people that were following them, or worse. These people continued to play the numbers game until they had spammed enough people to look like people actually cared what they were talking about. In reality, the people they spammed were happy to have someone follow them and followed back either out of courtesy or because they were in that second camp that I was in at the time of following people that followed you.

Useless

This is why your number of twitter followers doesn’t mean ISH! :D

You are being followed by people that have no idea what you do. You are being followed by people that have ZERO relevant information to contribute to your education or entertainment. You are being followed by people that flood the potentially relevant information off of your screen before you can possibly read, think about and react to it.

This is why people who claim to be following 60,000 people are full of ISH. I *guarantee* you that they are, because my timeline updates too quickly while I’m currently following 705 people. Even my group that I made specifically to listen to on TweetDeck moves too quickly, and that’s probably only 200 people.

I guarantee you it’s impossible for people to follow tens of thousands of people on Twitter, for two reasons. Updates will force most of those posts off the bottom of the queue before you even get the chance to see them and the time that it would take to read all of those posts, even if you could, would require you to sit in front of Twitter all day, reading irrelevant information and parsing it for something you could use. These people would literally do nothing else all day other than sit on Twitter, aggregate other people’s ideas and regurgitate them to their own followers.

Defunct Accounts

You can go on Twitter Karma and see your list of followers sorted by date of most recent update. At the time that I checked, when I was following ~2,400 people, there were quite a few that hadn’t updated in a full calendar year. Granted.. Some of those people may have blocked their data from being generally accessible, but upon random sampling of these accounts, they had literally updated 200 times or fewer and never used that account again. Also, that doesn’t mean that they’re not listening. It just means that they’re not sharing. It might also indicate that they’re currently using a different account.

Either way, the point is that one of your “followers” most likely doesn’t exist. They’re either not listening to you AT. ALL., or if they’re listening, they’re not responding or RTing (re-tweeting). I would estimate that around 200 out of my 2,400 followers at the time hadn’t updated in 2009, meaning at least for three months. Feel free to speculate about the numbers of defunct accounts for people that have 24,000 followers and 240,000 followers…

Evidence

If you’d like to check what your actual reach is as far as people following you on Twitter, start asking questions. See how many answers you get. Announce a live broadcast… See how many of your tens of thousands of followers tune in. Recently, I’ve seen popular Twitterers doing trivia contests, asking questions and handing out prizes. DO SOMETHING that demonstrates that that number on your Twitter home page actually translates to something tangible and something that isn’t an horrifically-low percentage of the people that have “subscribed to your channel”.

While you’re at it, ask a question that’s relevant to something useful to YOU. Ask about digital video data rates. Ask about replacement blades for your lawn mower. Ask about ANYTHING that’s not some generic audience participation exercise and see how useful your thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers are.

Influence

Having said all that.. Even if there are 20,000 defunct accounts out of 240,000, that still leaves 220,000 active accounts :D It’s possible that you have influence over 220,000 people that have no particular skill set or purchasing power. Of course, this has to be multiplied by the number of people that will RT what you posted.

In a generic sense, this is much better than my personal 2,381 followers (which is probably more like 1,000 followers). You are 100 times as likely to reach out to someone who will accept what you’re offering them.

Unfortunately, when you’re just some idiot that doesn’t specifically have anything of import to say, your followers are a function of that. This needs to be calculated into “influence”. If people follow you because you have a sexy avatar, for instance, that’s not going to be too useful to most advertisers. It’s not that you’re an authority on ANYTHING, so people aren’t going to be very likely to take your product endorsements to heart and actually buy the product.

Similarly, even if you ARE an authority on something, like video editing, that doesn’t mean that your influence is useful at all outside of that realm. In fact, your number of followers isn’t even an indication of the number of people that see you as an authority in video editing, because they might have followed you for other reasons.

Tools & Platforms

Ultimately, Twitter is a tool which affords you the opportunity to broadcast to other people what you know and what you do. If you don’t KNOW anything and you don’t DO anything, the number of twitter followers you have is completely meaningless. All these follow-back schemes are useless, because there’s no point in having 15,000 people follow you who are just as clueless as you are. Nobody’s going to pay you to advertise to your “Clueless Nation’. Nobody’s going to see you as an authority and hire you to do something because you have X amount of Twitter followers.

Your best bet is to stop crying about how many followers you have or don’t have and demonstrate originality and usefulness to the community and get your props the old fashioned way…

EARN IT!

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

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